BEFORE you ask "Norm who", let me tell you a little story
about Norm Gallagher, a ghost of Melbourne and Australia past. The
firebrand Maoist secretary of the Builders' Labourers Federation
made his way to Canberra in 1983 to attend Bob Hawke's landmark
economic summit, where, dressed in a bright blue jacket and
red-striped tie, he hobnobbed contentedly in the Parliament and the
Lodge with the captains of industry, his union comrades and the odd
man of God.

Gallagher had only recently been released from Pentridge after
being convicted for corruption, and further colourful times lay
ahead.

Imagine for one mad moment Kevin Rudd inviting Norm to the 2020
Summit and you have encapsulated in this tiny thought exercise,
both Australia's incredible societal transformation in only two
decades, and the sanitised plain-vanilla mores of contemporary
federal politics. No one even remotely like Norm, God rest his
soul, was drinking champagne last night at the National Portrait
Gallery in Canberra, or over at the Lodge at the welcome soiree for
movers and shakers with the Rudd family.

The 1983 summit defined both Hawke and his times just as 2020
defines both the politics of Kevin Rudd and the sensibility of our
times. Both use the same organisational principle: bring the power
elite to Canberra to attend the court of the new leader. Mix it up
for a few days until one group becomes indistinguishable from the
other, the elite becomes bolted on to the new government and its
progressive agenda, and the government gets the reflected glory of
the comely and powerful. Yes, yes, it is about letting the ideas
bloom and seeking fresh input from outside Canberra, and about new
politics, whatever that is, but its realpolitik is more
simple, it's about polite co-option.

With Hawke it was about imposing his unique form of consensus on
capital and labour to achieve his reformist government's core
economic objectives. With Rudd, apparently the weekend is about
vision. And with Rudd, the "vision" thing, while seemingly diffuse,
a hideous meaningless word invoked by advertising executives with
or without ponytails, is nonetheless critically important, because
for all Rudd's frenetic activity, this remains the lingering
question about Australia's new Prime Minister.

Yes we see the huge robotic incremental output, but where is all
this going? What are the defining issues? Just who is Kevin Rudd
and how will he transform the country? That is the real question
hovering in neon lights over the 2020 Summit. Who is this man, and
where will he take us?

Colleen Marion is clear where she wants Kevin Rudd to take us
through an event like the 2020 Summit, and that's back to the
grassroots. Marion, an Aboriginal community leader from Melbourne's
west, wanted to come to Canberra this weekend, but wasn't accepted
as a delegate to 2020. Instead she has helped her local
representatives, Bill Shorten, Nicola Roxon and Julia Gillard, run
two community-based mini-forums in the lead-up to this weekend.

Marion runs The Gathering Place in Maribyrnong, a hub for
delivering services for indigenous people. She believes her
organisation provides a model for community services that could be
rolled out in disadvantaged communities around the country. On song
with contemporary new Labor thinking, her idea is all about social
inclusion and relationship building. The problem is luring the new
king in Canberra out of his castle, and away from the usual
suspects seeking to define government approaches to dealing with
indigenous policy, to convince the Prime Minister to fall in love
with it.

"I think this Prime Minister will try and get it right for our
people," Marion says. "He's the first Prime Minister to have the
guts to stand out there and apologise. Now he needs to deliver. I
know they've got some academics up there in Canberra for the Summit
but I don't know if they've got practical Aboriginal people there.
I'm a grassroots leader in my community. I would have been a good
person to go. I had a lot to give, but I wasn't selected.

"If you get people from the grassroots then you can actually
talk about what happens in our communities. The Prime Minister
needs an advisory committee working with him, and not the same old
people, and you know exactly who I mean. I'd like new people
sitting around the table with him."

An idea proposed by Marion in the western suburbs forum 
to replicate her Gathering Place centre around the country 
will come to the big Summit courtesy of Bill Shorten. But she'd
rather be there.

So would many others overlooked for 2020. The monarchists are
unhappy that republicans have stolen a march and stacked the
governance forum, creating a neat platform to revive the debate
about knocking off the Queen as our head of state. The Australian
Medical Association has stamped its elegantly shod foot, as has the
representative body for small business organisations. Why those
posers and riff-raff and Kevin apologists and not us, various
offended souls have sniffed.

As 1983 was all about stitching together institutions and power
blocs to achieve outcomes  to the extent that newspapers
identified Hawke's delegates not by their names but by their
associations  2020 is a celebration of rampant individualism.
The internet has made us all intellectuals and published authors,
hasn't it? We are all bloody brilliant.

1983 was dour chaps and Norm, and everyone feigning cool with
Norm. 2020 is movie stars and writers and celebrity lawyers and
economics professors who advance their latest theories in blogs and
do applied work in birth timing.

WHILE many associations have crept on in there like a
slow spreading moss, (particularly groovy dudes like GetUp!, an
association appropriately all about individuals) people attending
the weekend are being asked to represent only their own egos and
intellects, not their employers. Again this reflects Rudd, who
drives everyone mad in his endless demand for ideas and options,
and who is not a creature of anything apart from his own smarts and
private passions and his unrelenting will to be prime minister. His
2020 Summit in praise of the glorious individual is bronzed in his
own, still brilliantly shiny, image.

Associations, to quote a Hilary Duff pop song that blares loudly
from my nine-year-old's bedroom, are So Yesterday, it's just
that some of them don't realise it yet. Some griping about being
snubbed have not quite grasped the fact that the world has moved
on, the brains behind 2020, Melbourne University Vice-Chancellor,
Glyn Davis, suggests to me patiently.

Davis is sipping a cup of black tea at Aussies Cafe in
Parliament House when we meet late in the week during a brief
hiatus before all hell breaks loose at the weekend. Some of these
people who claim to have been excluded from the talkfest did not,
according to the person organising the event, put their hands up to
attend. Entry to 2020, he points out calmly, was by nomination.

"It has that self-limiting aspect to it. It all depends on
people either nominating or being nominated. I actually think this
is not a bad group. Of course you can criticise it, and of course
you can think of great people that should be there (that aren't).
You are trying to set up a conversation that has some difference in
it, and that means some very, very good people missed out in order
to make sure we got someone, say from Western Australia, with
different experience in the group. We had no choice but to pay that
price. It was unfortunate that we disappointed some people."

More important than bruised egos is coming to terms with how on
earth this event is going to defy gravity, and not descend into a
dizzying barrage of manifestos unleashed chaotically from the
people who got off planes at Canberra International Airport last
night, before being taken by bus into the Department of Prime
Minister and Cabinet to collect their passes to the big event.

John Hartigan, the News Limited executive running ego central,
the governance forum at 2020, where the constitutional experts will
trade blows with the culture warriors and the crusading reporters,
still sounds slightly uncertain.

"I must say it will take a lot of good will," Hartigan says.
"I'm not absolutely confident, but I think we are getting to a
manageable process." Hartigan has broken his participants into
small groups. Some want to be in different groups. Of course they
do. But everyone is pressing on.

Key to the success of this Summit will be the army of invisible
people standing discreetly behind the co-chairs at each of the 10
streams. 2020 has secured the services of 40 professional
"facilitators", who according to Davis, are working pro bono:
consultants who specialise in managing big events and herding
participants to an outcome. Five of these magicians will look after
Hartigan's group, driving the discussion through the tight
timetable (Bill of Rights anyone? Can we wrap that one up before
morning tea on Saturday please, we need to get back to ripping up
the Constitution, and we have the republic to nut out first thing
on Sunday).

Scribes will sit off to the side, taking notes and recording all
the discussions. The sessions will be filmed and recorded to allow
contributions to be cross-checked. The public service volunteers
that Rudd's departmental head, Terry Moran, called for, prompting a
small squeak of outrage from the public sector union a few weeks
ago, have unbelievably turned up to guide the glamorous and the
vaguely disoriented to the facilities.

Blogging has been, depending on who you speak to, brisk or
boring on the private 2020 website set up for the exclusive use of
summiteers without the inconvenience of journalists sticking their
beaks in to transmit some of it to the public. (Incidentally, we
terrifying hacks have been asked in our instructions to keep a
polite distance from the summiteers at times we would otherwise
swoop, such as meal breaks. Federal officials are so far too polite
to tell us to back off new mother Cate Blanchett in the baby
changeroom, but we accept this instruction is implied, rather like
our right to free speech.)

And the fun-busters, Davis and his co-chairs, have been also
laying down the law to bolshie participants. Well, the rules.
"There is a set of simple rules that have gone out to participants
about respect and courtesy and how you participate in a public
discussion," Davis says, still enjoying his tea and smiling
benignly. "People who want to be in the conversation need to
understand the ground-rules. Facilitators are helping with that.
We've spoken to many of the participants. One of the things the
facilitators have been doing is pre-work, talking to people,
teasing out the issues people are hoping to discuss, reminding them
of the processes we are hoping to use.

"There is a huge amount of pre-work that has gone on. We've had
pep talks, many of us have already met at state level, some of the
groups have already met in small or large groups."

But again, not everyone is happy. Melbourne participant Andrew
Norton wrote on another participants' blog this week: "The
Victorian reception for (2020) participants on Tuesday night was
held in half-dark at the Melbourne Museum, and that was entirely
appropriate given the very limited information we've been given
about how this thing is to run. I found out at lunchtime today that
the productivity/education stream will have sub-streams  a
really basic organisational detail.

"And this morning our session was told one of our conclusions by
the PM.

"With nice weather forecast this weekend in Melbourne, the
opportunity cost of being stuck in Parliament House in Canberra for
two days is steadily rising."

Cheer up summiteers. There will be entertainment. The A-list
cracked the Lodge last night. The others are off to various soirees
and dinners around Canberra this evening. Working dinners of
course. The economics forum will eat in the Treasury building, the
security crowd in the foyer of the department of Foreign Affairs
and Trade, the arts folks at the National Museum overlooking Lake
Burley Griffin, and so on. There will be adequate breaks from the
brainstorming for everyone to play it cool around the famous people
and for the chief executives to tune in to the latest bad news from
the global markets.

KEVIN Rudd this week turned to God to outline his vision
thing for 2020 in a speech to the Sydney Institute. He paraphrased
the biblical proverb that says without vision, the people perish.
But he airbrushed the second bit of the proverb, which says "but he
that keepeth the law, happy is he". The second part is just as
relevant as the first in the context of 2020, particularly if the
hot air is to transform into outcomes.

Ah yes, outcomes. After Sunday, Rudd will have the thoughts of
his 1000 best and brightest to think about pillaging for his
manifesto. Officials will prepare a report, and he has promised to
respond by the end of 2008. Knowing Rudd, it will be well before
then.

And Glyn Davis, well, he'll head back to Melbourne, after months
of hard slog around the clock for his powerful mate in Canberra.
What fun it's been, an honour in fact, but what a relief to hand it
all over. "I'll get my life back," he says with a very large
smile.

FORUMS

Ten key discussion areas frame the 2020 Summit. About 100 people
will take part in each forum.

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